Description
One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets.
The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna brings us a sparkling—by turns funny and moving—novel about a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy.
Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either.
Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don’t the police come and investigate? When the local priest’s housekeeper begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions. As an outsider, she might be the only person who can uncover the truth. Or she might be getting in over her head. As she attempts to juggle a nosy landlady, a suspiciously dashing shepherd, and a network of local families bound together by a code of silence, Francesca finds herself forced to choose between the charitable mission that brought her to Santa Chionia, and her future happiness, between truth and survival.
Set in the wild heart of Calabria, a land of sheer cliff faces, ancient tradition, dazzling sunlight—and one of the world’s most ruthless criminal syndicates—The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a suspenseful puzzle mystery, a captivating romance, and an affecting portrait of a young woman in search of a meaningful life.
My Thoughts
I always enjoy and appreciate a well-written story, and The Lost Boy of Chionia is certainly that.
This is a complex and layered story featuring a fairly remarkable character in Franca, or the maestra of this remote Italian village. I found the story slow to start, but the author clearly relished the opportunity to describe the isolated environment and its inhabitants which shape the story as it really gets going. The meandering pace is the only thing keeping me from really loving this book. I picked it up, put it down, picked it up, put it down so many times. But, I kept at it and was rewarded with a story that unfolded into one of the most interesting tales I’ve read this summer.
Grames is very, very good at writing characters where their true natures are sort of peeled back gradually. She clearly relished the opportunity to build a microcosm of a world in Santa Chionia – a village so remote that its residents might as well be on another planet. Agatha Christie based so much of her work on the premise that evil can exist anywhere, even in the tiniest village, and Grames writes that concept very well indeed.
If you like mysteries without the gore and that make you think, you’ll enjoy this.
Publication Date: July 23, 2024
Published By: Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage & Anchor
Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy
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